Pigs, Pimps & Prostitutes: 3 Films by Shohei Imamura

DVD Box Set

Box Set Info

In the 1960s, Japanese filmmakers responded to a stale studio system by looking for fresh ways to tell stories, and Shohei Imamura was one of the leading figures of this new wave. With the three films in this set—Pigs and Battleships, The Insect Woman, and Intentions of Murder—Imamura truly emerged as an auteur, bringing to his national cinema an anthropological eye and a previously unseen taste for the irreverent. Claiming his interests lay in “the relationship of the lower part of the human body and the lower part of the social structure,” Imamura dotted the decade with earthy, juicy, idiosyncratic films featuring persevering, willful heroines. His remains a unique cinematic voice.

Collector’s Set Includes

A dazzling, unruly portrait of postwar Japan, Pigs and Battleships details, with escalating absurdity, the desperate power struggles between small-time gangsters in the port town of Yokosuka. The film is shot in gorgeously composed, bustling cinemascope.

Born in a rural farming village in 1918, Tomé survives decades of Japanese social upheaval, as well as abuse and servitude at the hands of various men. Yet Shohei Imamura refuses to make a victim of her, instead observing Tomé as a fascinating, pragmatic creature of twentieth-century Japan.

Sadako (Masumi Harukawa), cursed by generations before her and neglected by her common-law husband, falls prey to a brutal home intruder. But rather than become a victim, she forges a path to her own awakening. Intentions of Murder is gripping and audacious.

Disc Features

New, restored high-definition digital transfers

Conversations between Shohei Imamura and critic Tadao Sato about The Insect Woman and Intentions of Murder

“Imamura, the Free Thinker,” a 1995 episode of the French television series Cinéma de notre temps

Interviews with renowned critic and historian Tony Rayns on all three films